Nidal Moukaddam, MD, PhD

Baylor College of Medicine - USA

Nidal Moukaddam, Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine, is a graduate of AUB for her undergraduate (BS, ‘92) and medical school (MD, ’99) degrees. She emigrated to the US where she completed residency in general psychiatry and PhD in clinical sciences at the University of Medical Branch, Galveston, TX. In addition to adult psychiatry certification via the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology, for which she served as a board examiner, she is additionally certified in addiction Medicine from by the American Society of Addiction Medicine and the American Board of Preventive Medicine. She also briefly trained at the Beck Institute in Philadelphia for cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).

Dr. Moukaddam is active clinically and specializes in challenging adult populations: she practices emergency psychiatry at Ben Taub Hospital, a level 1 trauma center in Houston, Texas, which serves as a prolific referral base for her buprenorphine medication-assisted treatment clinic and CBT group psychotherapy for individuals with addictive disorders and chronic psychotic disorders.

In the educational field, Dr. Moukaddam supervises students and residents, has received numerous teaching awards, and focuses her teaching on the areas of instant countertransference, a concept that has evolved out of years of collaboration with emergency medicine partners, and bias sensitivity.

Research interest focus on how psychiatry can benefit from technological advances for detection, tracking, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. In collaboration with Rice University Engineering school, she has pioneered the creation and testing of smartphone applications for depression across the age spectrum, and to enhance wellness and combat burnout in trainees. sThe result of this ongoing collaboration is an open, fee-free, dynamic platform for academic collaboration, Healthsense, that is now available for researchers wishing to engage in sensor-based measurements in their studies.

Technology has endless applications, and exciting prospects to improve lives, thus, other project Dr. Moukaddam is involved in include combining saliva proteomic markers and Healthsense app tracking to identify traumatic brain injury (effort funded by the National Institute of Health), and to use functional imaging to enhance our ability to diagnose depression and bipolar disorders in individuals with addiction (The Mcnair Initiative for neuroscience Discovery).